New Scientist, 13 November 2004
p 36 (box within cover story "The Intoxication
Instinct" by Helen Phillips and Graham Lawton)

Note: This is the original version, and was
slightly edited for publication.

Psychedelic drugs provide some of the best
evidence we have that the mind is the brain; that our thoughts,
beliefs, and perceptions are created by chemistry. Take a drug,
particularly a hallucinogen, and any of these can change, and even our
innermost selves can be quite transformed. This means these drugs can
be scary, and need to be taken with great care and respect, for they
can potentially reveal some of the deepest secrets about our minds and
consciousness.

A century ago, long before prohibition, the
groundwork of a science of intoxication was already being laid down,
and the American psychologist, William James, experimented with the
anaesthetic, nitrous oxide or “laughing gas”. Our normal rational
consciousness, he said, is just one special type of consciousness,
while all around it, “parted from it by the filmiest of screens”
are other entirely different forms of consciousness, always available
if only the requisite stimulus is applied.

Other experimenters meticulously described the
effects of inhaling ether, chloroform or cannabis, and the strange
distortions of time, perception, and sense of humour this induced.
More curiously, they also described changes in belief, and even in
philosophy. For example, nitrous oxide has the curious capacity to
change materialist scientists into idealists. Its discoverer, Sir
Humphrey Davy, bravely took the drug himself as an experiment in 1799
and ended up exclaiming that “Nothing exists but thoughts”. Others
made similar observations and found their views profoundly shifted by
even brief encounters with the other side of that filmy screen.

This raises the peculiar question of whether what
James’s called “our normal rational consciousness” is
necessarily the best for understanding the world. After all, if
one’s view of the world can change so dramatically with the aid of a
simple molecule like nitrous oxide, how can we be sure that our normal
brain chemistry is the one most suited to doing science and
philosophy? What if evolution had taken a slightly different turn and
we had ended up with brain chemistry less inclined to make us believe
in God or the afterlife. Or what if our actual brain chemistry evolved
to help us survive and reproduce at the cost of giving us false
beliefs about the world? If so, it is possible that mind-altering
drugs might in fact give us a better, not worse, insight than we have
in our so-called normal state.

Take the common experience of losing our separate
self, or becoming one with the universe. This may seem, to some, like
mystical nonsense, but in fact it fits far better with a scientific
understanding of the world than our normal dualist view. Most of us
feel, most of the time, that we are some kind of separate self who
inhabits our body like a driver in a car or a pilot in a plane. We
speak about “my body” and even “my brain” as though “I”
were something separate from them both. Throughout history many people
have believed in a soul or spirit that can leave the body and even
survive after death. Yet science has long known that this cannot be
so. There is no observer inside the brain who has our experiences, and
no space in the brain from where an inner self can control it. There
is just a brain that is made of exactly the same kind of stuff as the
world around it. In other words, we really are one with the universe.

This means that the psychedelic sense of self may
actually be truer than the common dualist view. So although our normal
state is better for surviving and reproducing, it may not always be
best for understanding who and what we are. Perhaps we could even have
sciences carried out in some of these intoxicated states. This was
just what psychologist, Charles Tart, suggested in 1972, in the
prestigious journal Science. He likened different states of
consciousness to different paradigms in science and proposed the
creation of “state specific sciences”; new sciences which would be
done by scientists working in altered states and communicating their
findings to others in those states. These new sciences might only have
limited application but this makes the point that our normal state,
constrained as it is by the particular chemistry evolution has given
us, may not be the only way to try to understand the universe.

Since Tart’s pioneering work on mapping altered
states, most of the psychedelic drugs have become prohibited and
research has largely been stifled. While the cultures that have used
these drugs for millennia treat them with great respect, and control
them with elaborate rituals and traditions, our culture gives over
their control to criminals and tries to deny their amazing
mind-revealing capacities. Perhaps one day, when prohibition is
finally abandoned, scientists may once again take up the promise
offered by those tiny little chemicals that can tell us who and what
we are.